Creighton J. Britannia. The creation of a Roman province
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mindsets amongst those individuals who came to Britain. What idea and
experience of communal living were brought to Britain from outside? There
will have been as many different experiences as individuals arriving in the
country, but below we will explore two perspectives, life as might be imagined
in the cities of Italy and life in the other dense nucleated sites of the Empire
– military forts. The aim is not to describe towns and forts as a collection of
various types of building, but to gain a feel for how life was enacted within
and amongst these, introducing along the way a little terminology from social
theory. The purpose of doing this is to create comparisons against which to
contrast our British towns – rather than to create a checklist of ‘Roman’ and
‘non-Roman’ features which would be entirely spurious, since, as the follow-
ing chapters will demonstrate, romanitas is a very movable feast.
Civilian experiences of communal living
Arriving in Britain came the army, along with administrators ready to meas-
ure, codify and tax the land and populace of the emerging province. The
Governor and Procurator each had his own staff, many on temporary tours
of duty. These infl uential people will have been the movers and shakers
of the time, added to by other visitors: traders, some from Gaul, but also
freedmen acting on behalf of their Roman aristocratic patrons, engaged in
military supply contracts or commerce of their own. These were people who
had money, and who had to make their stay in Britain as palatable as they
could, before retreating back to the safety of their own homelands.
It is important that we gain an insight into how many of these most infl u-
ential people seconded to Roman Britain understood city life; and how (up
to a point) they would have in their own ways sought to re-create familiar
patterns of existence around them.
Sadly the interpretation of life in no two towns will ever be exactly the same,
so the example being investigated here is that of Pompeii, a city conveniently
frozen in time in AD 79, approximately the date when the monumentalisation
of British sites was getting underway. It is a mythical representation because
even the interpretations of the city draw not only upon the archaeological
remains, but also upon literary sources describing aspects of life in Rome
and other geographically disparate sites. So even these narratives are con-
scious or unconscious amalgams of classical life in a series of townscapes,
unwittingly normalising the varied experience of a wider range of towns and
lives. But it will serve to give us a feeling for what a Roman Governor might
expect of what he understood to be a ‘Roman town’. The concepts from
social theory I want to introduce along the way are: time-space distanciation;
the duality of social structure; and cities as storage containers of authorita-
tive resources. Rather than present any of these in the abstract, it would be
easiest to let them arise within illustrated examples.
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79
Social status in the Roman world and the domus
The world of the late Republic and the Empire was highly structured, with
clear social orders existing. The presence of these structures should not lead
to an underestimation of the social mobility between the ranks that could
occur over generations (Hopkins 1983).
At the top were the Senators, about 600 in all. Senatorial rank was not
strictly hereditary, though their sons were marked out, and allowed to wear
the latus clavus (the toga with the broad purple stripe which signifi ed senat-
orial rank), and to accompany their fathers to meetings of the Senate (Suet.
Aug. 38). None the less, the distinction of being descended from a Senator
lasted for three generations. Even though it is not known if any Senators
ever originated from Britain, this order is important as all of the governors
of the provinces were drawn from it.
The Equestrians were the second-highest rank, denoted by wearing gold
rings, though only having a narrow purple stripe on their toga (angustus
clavus). Many were up-and-coming politicians or administrators in Rome, but
others had aspirations little greater than serving in their own hometowns in
Italy (or elsewhere). During the time of interest to us, Augustus and Tiberius
had done much to redefi ne these orders and create greater social distance
between them and other classes. Augustus had disallowed marriage between
Senators and freedwomen, whereas Tiberius required at least two generations
of free birth for someone to become an Equestrian (Plin. NH 33.32). In
themselves, these reforms show how permeable these hierarchical bounda-
ries had become.
Beyond the core of the Roman aristocracy you had the Decuriones, the
town magistrates across the Empire. Within Italy these were all Roman cit-
izens already, but in the provinces this was a way to gain enfranchisement.
Below them came a range of groups: citizens, freedmen and women, non-
citizens and slaves. While technically rank was in that order, the wealth of
many freedmen and the status of certain slaves meant that quality of exist-
ence and technical rank were by no means directly related.
The social order may have been enshrined in law, but social reproduc-
tion relied not upon this, but upon a wide range of acts that occurred day
in and day out which reaffi rmed hierarchy and the social order: in the domus,
in the theatre, in the forum and elsewhere. Individuals within the commun-
ity varying in status would meet in all these locations. When they did so
they responded to each other in ways informed by social convention. In so
doing both acknowledged their position in society (showing themselves to be
knowledgeable and competent social actors) and at the same time reinforced
these patterns of behaviour. This is what Giddens defi ned as the duality of
structure, whereby he meant that ‘the structured properties of social sys-
tems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts’ (Giddens
1995: 19).
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80
The domus was an important location for reaffi rming social structure.
Within towns, the houses of the families of high status were the starting
points of pieces of theatre each morning, which reinforced individuals’
social position relative to each other. This was salutatio. At sunrise the clients
of the great and the good would arrive at the entrance to their patron’s domus,
to pay their respects. Social hierarchy became visible in two ways on these
occasions: fi rst by everyone’s position in the queue (most important client
fi rst); secondly by the length of the queue in front of each patron’s door
(more clients equals greater status). The benefi t to the minion for turning up
was to receive a little food or a small payment (sportulae). Six sestercii was an
amount mentioned in the Republic (Mart. Epig. 3.7), and there is enough evid-
ence to suggest this practice continued into the Flavian period. This visual
demonstration of social hierarchy could also be replicated at dinners, where
again seating and even food and drink could be determined by relative status
(Mart. Epig. 4.68, 6.11; Plin. Letters 2.6.2).
Social status in the theatre and amphitheatre
Salutatio was only one occasion, but whenever there were formal meetings
status would be the determinant of how people interacted. One setting
where a cross-section of the town’s populace might come to see itself was
in the banked seats of the theatre or amphitheatre. Here law and convention
segregated people according to rank. In Rome special seats were allocated to
Senators, Equestrians and Citizens, and other divisions categor ised people
into solders and civilians, or created areas for boys near their tutors. To
enhance the distinctions even dress codes existed (Suet. Aug. 4, Claud. 21;
Dio 60.7; Tac. Ann. 15.32). Segregation was by no means a preserve of
Rome’s auditoria. The law codes of two towns in southern Spain suggest
it was a matter for concern there too. In the colony of Urso it was said
natives should be separated from outsiders, and massive fi nes could be levied
if someone sat in the wrong place (Lex. Col. Gen. Jul. 126). None the less,
Urso was a Caesarean colony, nominally a little piece of Rome far far away;
however the law code from Irni reveals how things were perceived in a tiny
obscure Flavian municipium. Here the bronze tablets show that differentiation
at the theatre was something which was not reliant upon the establishment
of the law codes, but was a practice already happening before Irni was
elevated to its municipal status. The eighty-fi rst chapter reads: ‘whatever
games are given in that municipium in whatsoever seats each group of men
was accustomed to watch those games before this statute, they are to watch
them in the same seats’ (Lex. Irnit. 81; Gonzales and Crawford 1986). Of
course we have no way of telling archaeologically to what extent these law
codes were enforced, but from the literary evidence Whittaker summed it up
well: ‘the theatre . . . was not just a building for theatrical performances but
a reproduction of the moral order of the city in symbolic form’ (Whittaker
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN
81
1997: 146). Law, practice, ushers and architecture all contributed to these
repeated public displays of the power relations between rich and poor.
In the description above, the social relations of the entire town would be
made visible, but the theatre did not just reinforce the internal civic hierarchy,
but related it to the imperial one. In amongst the statues of gods and muses
in the scaenae frons would be that of the Emperor himself; the curtains might
also combine representations of Victory and bound barbarians. Collectively
the ordered populace of the community saw itself in relation to the Princeps
and the gods. Order was incarnate in the body of the population (Kolendo
1981).
The presence of a representation of the Princeps here is important in the
integration of the community with the Empire. One thing that distinguishes
cities and empires from small-scale societies is the way that individuals are
integrated into a wider whole. This is what Giddens refers to as ‘time-space
distanciation’:
Every social system in some way ‘stretches’ across time and space.
Time-space distanciation refers to the modes in which such ‘stretch-
ing’ takes place or, to shift the metaphor slightly, how social systems
are ‘embedded’ in time and space. In the smaller societ ies, hunters
and gatherers or settled independent agricultural commun ities, time-
space distanciation occurs primarily as a result of two connected
features of societal organisation: the grounding of legitimation in
tradition, and the role played by kinship in the structuration of social
relations, each of which is in turn normally anchored in religion.
But these societies above all involve presence, or what I term ‘high
presence-availability’. There are relatively few social transactions
with others who are physically absent. In these societies, the human
memory (expressed in knowledge of tradition, as a series of contin-
uing practices, and in story-telling and myth) is the principal ‘storage
container’ which ‘brackets’ time-space.
(Giddens 1995: 4–5)
As the scale of society changes, so less and less takes place face to face, and
the number and geographical spread of people within one ‘society’ increase.
As this happens time-space is stretched and mechanisms occur which
attempt to relate distant parts of the same society. The Emperor might rarely,
if ever, be seen in the cities of Campania, let alone further fl ung parts of the
Empire. Yet his presence-availability was enhanced through strategies such as
his statue presiding over events in the theatre, his image on the coinage and
the actions of his agents in his name.
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82
Social status in the forum
Memory and presence-availability were also crucial phenomena in the nature
of the forum. The brain as a storage of memory retains far more than just a
fi le of personal experiences, it is also the repository of half-remembered his-
tory: the past experiences of the collectivity. Contemporary rank and status
could be continually reinforced through the use of the procession, salutatio,
seating in the theatre, etc., but longer-term memory and that of the collectiv-
ity also needed reinforcing. This certainly happened in the fora of the cities
of the Empire.
Into this arena would come the great and the good of the cities, followed
in procession by their clients with whom they had been holding court earlier
that morning. Their arrival itself constituted a display of the social order
within the town at that time, and guaranteed the patron at least some people
to applaud his speeches. However, within the forum their position was con-
textualised across far broader time and space through the use of statues and
inscriptions.
Studies across Italy, Spain and North Africa about the placement of statues
have shown relatively common patterns emerging. It seems that the size and
positioning of statues was carefully tied to social status. Over half the images
tended to represent the Emperor or fi gures closely related to him, such as
Victory or fortuna redux. Where there was a basilica from which justice would
be dispensed, this was where the Princeps’s image was likely to be placed. The
positioning and size of the Emperor’s statue in relation to those of others was
evidently regulated by its repeated mention in the treason trials under Tiberius
(Tac. Ann. 1.74). This should not surprise us. Even in many modern countries
representations of symbolic statues are highly controlled. For example, in
Venezuela all communities have to have an image of the country’s liber ator,
Simon Bolivar, in a square named after the hero: cities have an equestrian
statue; towns show him standing; whereas villages just have a bust.
These images of the Princeps located the local populace geographically
within the Empire. Whereas situating them within time were the statues of
other worthies from the town’s past: its patrons, Senators, Equestrians, magis-
trates, curiales and others; all displayed in clear arrangements showing relative
importance (Whittaker 1997: 146). The statues provided a concrete memory
of the past of the town (however fi ctionalised and tidied up), linked with
and legitimating contemporary authority. This kind of arrangement mirrored
that at the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome, constructed by Augustus, where
the descendants of the Julian house mixed with the heroes of Republican
Rome to provide a visible history of the state, with Augustus conceptually at
its centre (Zanker 1988: 214).
The forum was also where the city archives were kept, and where the civic
charter and rulings were displayed. As such it probably contained the highest
density of the written word of all the buildings in a town (cf. Hassall 2003).
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN
83
All in all, to visit the forum was to see an unfolding pattern of power rela-
tionships at play (Häussler 1999; Revell 1999)
Spatial geography in towns – procession, community
and euergetism
As a religious, ceremonial and commercial centre, the city is a
distinctive feature of all societies characterised by extensive time-
space distanciation; and it is the main locus of the state. Following
Mumford, I regard the city in non-capitalist societies as a special
form of ‘storage container’, a crucible for the generation of power
upon a scale unknown to non-urbanised communities.
(Giddens 1995: 6)
Let us try to pull together some of these elements. The generation and
reproduction of structures of authority are a signifi cant function of all of
these building blocks, not commercial transactions or the redistribution
of goods. Each locale (domus, auditorium and the forum) provides for the
repeated display and affi rmation of the social order. Yet more often than
not, towns are looked at in economic terms as centres for the redistribution
of material goods (allocative resources) as economic entities; they are less
often considered as centres for the manipulation of power (authoritative
resources), though this is what is going to interest us here in the chapters
which follow (Giddens 1995: 51). It would be worth considering how these
elements linked together in the way life was enacted in the town, and to see
how townscapes developed through time.
No two towns are the same, not in Britain and certainly not in Italy. Yet
our aim here is to imagine the rhythms of life as might have been experi-
enced by someone who had lived in a town in Italy but found himself on
a tour of duty out in the provinces in the later fi rst century AD, when the
towns of Britain were starting to develop. Given this, Pompeii is an ideal
example, well studied and particularly well preserved in just this period owing
to the eruption of Vesuvius fossilising it in AD 79.
The enactment of life within Pompeii has been studied by Laurence
(1994). He examined the movement of people across the townscape, relating
the chronological pattern of the day’s activities to the spatial geography of
the town. In the traditional order of the day, after salutatio, the town’s wor-
thies would make their way to the forum. Behind them would process their
clients and friends. As they wound their way through the streets they passed
the whole variety of town life. The elite houses were not tucked away in sep-
arate residential quarters, but surrounded by smaller houses and shops. As
the line passed in front of the other residents, comparisons could be seen:
more might be in one procession than another; observers would note who
was a client of whom. After several hours networking in the forum, the
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN
84
patron might pass on to the baths in the early afternoon, by which time the
temperature of the water would be at its optimum. Again, the clients might
join him in procession there. Finally, at the end of the day, public business
done, there would be the return home.
A key part of elite display was the movement through the city with
an entourage of clients. To fulfi l this need the place of residence
needed to be a short distance from the forum; the baths needed to
be a short distance from the forum and the place of residence, to
create the possibility of people going about their daily lives seeing
the passage of the elite through the city . . . It is such a temporal
logic of elite activity that locates the public buildings and in particu-
lar the public baths, and also the need of the elite's residence to be
separate from the place of social activity distributed the elite’s place
of residence throughout the city rather than concentrating them in
any one area.
(Laurence 1994: 131)
Had all the public buildings been located together, with all elite residences
close to the heart of the town, there would have been no purpose or role
in public procession. Instead, what we have are elite residences dispersed in
choice locations around the town (Woolf 1998: 117), and public monuments
often similarly spread out. Having everything clustered together would have
been a disaster, minimising the possibility of public display.
How did this townscape come about? Only a few towns are created
afresh as new monumental endeavours, such as some of Rome’s early colon-
ies on green-fi eld sites (e.g. Cosa). A few were extensively remodelled, but
these cases were rare, such as Hadrian’s expansion of Italica, the town of
his adoptive father Trajan (Rodríguez Hidalgo et al. 2000); or the Severan
redevelopment of Lepcis Magna. More often than not, towns were the
cumulative result of organic growth, the outcome not of an overall redesign
but of individual acts of benefaction (or euergetism), spread out across gen-
erations. We can see this at Pompeii, which experienced almost con tinuous
development through the late Republic and early Principate until its ulti-
mate destruction in AD 79. The number of temples, baths and theatres
was doubled and an amphitheatre constructed. This gradual evolution pro-
vided the opportunity to change and adapt as the political and social climate
altered. With the revolu tion of the Principate existing buildings were trans-
formed to refl ect the new order:
In this process of change, the urban elite were motivated to put
up buildings to glorify the gods, their city and themselves. In this
process of euergetism, the elite made choices about what sort of
building to put up. For example Eumachia chose to build a porticus
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN
85
dedicated to Concordia Augusta and Pietas, rather than a temple,
theatre or amphitheatre. However, there would seem to have been
a practical constraint upon this process. Once a city had one amphi-
theatre, it would not necessarily have been desirable to have another.
Therefore in the period from 80 BC to AD 79, we see euergetism
as a cumulative process, in which the civic identity is altered and
changed through the addition of new buildings and the restoration
and enhancement of the existing structures. This process closely
parallels civic developments at Rome.
(Laurence 1994: 36)
In a developing townscape, the availability of space for new structures was
contingent upon existing ownership rights or the fortunes of the property
market. Land would rarely all be available in one location. Hence bath-
houses, temples, theatres and the like would often be spread out across
the town, just as elite residences were. Because of the temporal and spatial
demands of social display and procession, this did not represent a problem.
Sometimes euergetism would lead to the streets themselves being elaborated,
with paving stones or colonnades and arches – smaller projects, which none
the less again served to remind the populace of the individual benefactors.
Even though the elite may have moved between the disparate foci of
the town, there was in Pompeii a sense of community on a smaller scale
within the totality; this was the vicus or district. In Pompeii there were two
local magistrates for each district. The focus for the vicus was not another
public building but local shrines of the lares Augusti and the altars of the lares
Compitales (Laurence 1994: 40); within each area there was also provision for
drinking water. Whereas procession and movement across the town might
have heightened and reaffi rmed social ranking, the vicus integrated the local
community in all its diversity.
Finally, individuals were also brought together in a shared ideological
sense of ‘self ’ expressed in the Latin term humanitas, often translated now as
‘civilisation’:
by the late fi rst century BC humanitas had been formulated as a thor-
oughly Roman concept, embodying concepts of culture and conduct
that were regarded by Romans as the hallmarks of the aristocracy
in particular, yet also appropriate for mankind in general. Humanitas
thus distinguished an elite as cultivated, enlightened, humane and so
fi tted to rule and lead by example, but it also encapsulated a set of
ideals to which all men might aspire.
(Woolf 1998: 54)
So what makes a town ‘Roman’? The above gives us a fl avour of what one
group of people living in Italy would have considered familiar and for them
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN
86
normal. The main element is a series of arenas in which individuals repeatedly
recalled and reaffi rmed their position within the local social structure and
their place in the Empire. In terms of spatial geography we have the vicus
providing a small-scale focus within the town. On a larger scale we have the
patrons and their processions of clients wandering through the town, bind-
ing it together as they move from one locale to another dispersed across the
city, reinforcing ideological norms and aspirations.
These are the kinds of life experiences that Governors, Equestrians, freed-
men may have brought to Britain with them on tours of duty, or while
engaged in trade in the province. But they were not the only images of com-
munal living that immigrants could have brought with them. Many soldiers
would have come with very different experiences of communal living, origin-
ating in the military camp.
Military experiences of communal living
Knowledge of living in the towns of the Empire may have arrived with freed-
men trading and career aristocrats on tours of duty in the province, but they
were not the only individuals acquainted with communal living arriving in
numbers in Britain. The largest group by far were members of the army,
though their experience and behavioural norms will have been very different.
Their potential impact can be judged by the potential numbers that retired
here. With four legions present in Britain for much of the later fi rst century,
between 400 and 800 legionaries would have reached retirement age every
year, added to which should be a comparable number of auxiliaries (Mann
1983: 59). Some may have returned home, but a high proportion tended to
settle in their last province, either in the new military veteran colonies, near
their garrisons or elsewhere. The scale of this form of immigration needs to
be recognised:
To understand the context of the foundations of Gloucester and
Lincoln, it is fi rst necessary to consider the destination of legionary
veterans who, in the period of a little over half a century between
the invasion of 43 and the foundation of these two coloniae, might
have numbered in excess of 20,000 men. In the fi rst place, the
foundation of the colonia at Camulodunum in 49 would have accom-
modated all those who chose to retire in Britain over a period of,
perhaps, a decade or less. Even if only half the veterans chose to
stay in Britain and we assign three dependants to each, that would
give a total of some 6,000 over 10 years. That would have provided
Camulodunum with a substantial population which, allowing for
dependants, would have exceeded the estimates . . . for any urban
population in the history of Roman Britain.
(Fulford 1999b: 177)
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN
87
It is on this basis we need to understand the experience and values that
Roman soldiers will have brought to the creation of towns in Roman Britain.
What was life in forts like? How similar or different was it to the rhythms of
life in an Italian town? Both had rectilinear streets; both had specifi c rituals
associated with their foundation (Rykwert 1976), but what of day-to-day
living? The notion that the fort was like a town was a common idea, as Livy
describes: ‘this abode is the soldier’s second homeland; its rampart serves
as his city walls, and his tent is the soldier’s hearth and home’ (Liv. 44.39).
Polybius similarly remarked that ‘the whole camp . . . forms a square, and the
way in which the streets are laid out and its general arrangement give it the
appearance of a town’ (Polyb. 6.31.10). This statement is often quoted, but
what is not is his further explanation of why the camp felt like a town. The
key aspect was familiarity, everyone knowing his place. As an army moved on
campaign, it sent scouts ahead to decide where to camp for the night. Before
the main party arrived, a military tribune and selected centurions charged
with the task would have marked out the form and shape of the fort with
differently coloured fl ags. A white fl ag for the praetorium, crimson for prin-
cipal intersects of the streets, and other colours and spears for additional key
positions.
Consequently it is obvious that when the legions march up and get
a good view of the site for the camp, all the parts of it are known at
once to everyone, as they have only to reckon from the position of
the consul’s fl ag. So that, as everyone knows exactly in which street
and in what part of the street his tent will be, since all invariably
occupy the same place in camp, the encamping somewhat resembles
the return of an army to its native city. For then they break up at
the gate and everyone goes straight from there and reaches his own
house without fail, as he knows both the quarter and the exact spot
where his residence is situated. It is very much the same thing in a
Roman camp.
The Romans by thus studying convenience in this matter pursue,
it seems to me, a course diametrically opposite to that usually among
the Greeks. The Greeks in encamping think it of primary impor-
tance to adapt the camp to the natural advantages of the ground,
fi rst because they shirk the labour of entrenching, and next because
they think artifi cial defences are not equal in value to the fortifi ca-
tions which nature provides unaided on the spot. So that as regards
the plan of the camp as a whole they are obliged to adopt all kinds
of shapes to suit the nature of the ground, and they often have to
shift the parts of the army to unsuitable situations, the consequence
being that everyone is quite uncertain whereabouts in the camp his
own place or the place of his corps is. The Romans on the contrary
prefer to submit to the fatigue of entrenching and other defensive
THE IDEA OF THE TOWN